Whip (23 page)

Parafrags.

Oh, they were nasty little critters, all right. You take one twenty-three-pound bomb, stick an instantaneous fuze on the nasty end and hang the critter from a small chute.

Pack the chute and the fragmentation bomb into a neat package, hang the packages from honeycomb racks inside a bomb bay, and one B-25 can dump more than a hundred of the things in a sweeping pass down an enemy runway.

The Japanese had never seen them before. There was something very special about a new weapon; its effect could be overwhelming, because if you didn't know what was coming you had no protection against it.

"I want the mission to Lae," Whip announced suddenly.

"Your job is to — "

"I want that mission."

"Your job is to follow orders."

"Then
order
me to go."

"You — "

"You've got to send somebody, Colonel. You can't duck it. Somebody has to go out there and ring their goddamned bell."

Goodman turned slowly. "Yes, they do. But I don't want my men emotionally involved.

And you're emotionally — "

"It's my pick, Lou."

"What makes that so?"

Whip threw out his arm. "This whole goddamned show has been mine from the beginning, remember? Special orders. Go out and kill Japs. Tear 'em limb from limb. The idea of a war is to
kill
. Well, I'm the best killer you got, Colonel Goodman, and if you send in any other outfit except the best, then you become the killer. One way or the other I get that mission. With you or without you, and if I have to I'll eat you alive and go straight to Smyth or Whitehead or — "

"You've got it."

"Smart."

"Yes, but not the way you think."

"Oh?"

"If you weren't the best outfit, Major, and if you didn't have the best chance of pulling it off and getting your people home, I might have been a bit more than you could eat alive or any other way."

Whip whooped with laughter and slapped Goodman on the shoulder. "You're a tough old bastard, you know that, Lou?"

"You little son of a bitch, get out of here."

"Not yet. When are you making contact with the Australian commandos?"

Goodman showed his surprise. "I don't understand."

"You will.
After
I have a little chat with them, that is."

Goodman glanced at his watch. "About two hours from now. Regular schedule. They could be late, of course."

"Of course. They could be dead. Tomorrow we could all be dead, right? I'll be there in an hour forty-five, Lou. Right in the radio shack."

Whip might have been fanatical, even crazy. But he wasn't stupid. He knew his airplanes had chewed up fighters, where other bombers had gone down like flies, but he was also aware that they'd had surprise by the ton that innovation and surprise and enormous firepower had been on their side. All the factors necessary to get the cutting edge and keep it. But by now the Japs had tumbled to their act. They could still take on the average Japanese fighter and give him a hell of a run for his money, but in the long-distance running, especially if the fighter jocks were sharp, you had to put your money on the Zero fighters. Because sooner or later they'd win. They were made to fight in the air and the B-25 wasn't and when it was all said and done, the odds lay heavily in their favor.

So the kicker was simple. Don't fight the sons of heaven on
their
terms. Hit 'em when they don't expect it and hit 'em in a way they wouldn't dream. That way they might not have their chance to shoot you out of the sky, before the Zeros clawed their way to altitude and built up speed. The B-25 flew on the deck and the kicker was to keep the Zeros
below
them.

Two days, the Australians had said. It would take two days to get into position, to set it up. But it would have to be timed perfectly, the coordination had to be exact. Whip would leave nothing to chance. He had to know down to a block of thirty seconds, no longer, the exact time needed to make his climb-out, the cross-country to get into position, the run onto the target.

And to brief his own men. They were going to have to fly and fight in a way none of them had ever done before.

But it would by God be worth it.

23

Two winged specks in the sky approached from the east. The antiaircraft gunners at Lae airdrome relaxed when they recognized the airplanes as Zeros. Now they watched with professional interest. They had seen thousands of landings and they had become experts.

They nodded to one another. They approved. These were some of the better pilots. You could tell the way the fighters rushed overhead, from the muted sound of the Sakae engines, the manner in which the men in each machine eased around to land. Ah! The gear, the flaps, the machines held so perfectly, fragile butterflys floating down from their cushions of air.

Commander Gaishi Naogaka felt his wheels touch gently. He had no need to look to his right and slightly behind, for even on the narrow runway of Lae he knew Tanin Yamaya would be in perfect position. Naogaka was the Wing Leader of Lae, and also the leader of the 1st Squadron. He had selected Yamaya to take his place when he, Naogaka, had to remain on the ground, as he did much too often.

Tanin Yamaya had been with him in China, and in the Philippines and in the Dutch East Indies when the fighting centered about Java. Yamaya had been his wingman then and he had scored twenty-three kills since early 1940. A good man. Skilled, utterly loyal, fearless.

And like most of the other pilots in the Lae Wing he was confused, beset with doubts.

Things were not going well. That was the purpose of Commander Gaishi Naogaka's flight to area headquarters at Rabaul. To decide upon a course of action to counter the strange turn of events with the Americans.

Naogaka parked his fighter at the far end of the field and climbed down from the wing.

He talked briefly with Yamaya. "You will say nothing to the other men. Commander Terauchi will be the one to speak."

"Yes, sir."

"After you have reported in, you will eat. Then wait for me in my quarters."

"Yes, sir."

Naogaka shed himself of his parachute and flight jacket. At altitude on the way back from Rabaul the temperature had been down to only fifteen degrees. Now it was again well above one hundred, and he had not reached the ground from his wing before the perspiration broke out on his body. He stood for a moment; that timeless stretch when the pilot makes the mental transition after the physical to compensate for his once again being chained to the earth. He looked about him.

Bah. He did not like this place. Perhaps he had never really thought of it before. They called this an airfield? This filthy hellhole? An airfield, without hangars or maintenance sheds or even a control tower? Lae was an insult to the meaning of airfield. One dirty, small runway no more than three thousand feet in length. It could have been a swamp.

On three sides of the runway, in the immediate distance, there towered the rugged mountains of the Papuan peninsula. The fourth side, the open end of the runway, stretched almost to the ocean.

The runway ran at a right angle from a mountain slope to near the water. Adjacent to the beach lay what was left of a small aircraft hangar, battered and ripped with shrapnel and bullet holes. Made by both Japanese and American weapons, thought Naogaka.

Months before three Australian transport planes had been shattered by bomb blasts and they still lay now where they had then, tumbled, rusting wreckage. Demolished equipment and debris littered the area beyond. There was no time here at Lae to spend in cleaning the grounds.

Naogaka wondered what it had been like here before the war, when the Australians had used this field to airlift supplies to and gold ore from the Kokoda Mine. Even then it could only have been miserable. Even then the seaport could have been no better than now. A joke, really. One primitive pier, and in the harbor mud, its stern and mast jutting from the water, a single small merchantman of five hundred tons. Australian. Sunk when the Japanese first struck, left where it sank into the gripping muck. It was the worst airfield Naogaka had ever seen.

How did they manage to handle seventy Zero fighters without hangars, wondered Naogaka. But they did, and their in-commission rate was so high it was astonishing. All the more so when one considered that the maintenance crews worked no matter what the weather. Improvised shelters of mats and canvas were enough.

For months Lae airfield had not even enjoyed the status of a control tower. Finally the pilots got together on their own and used logs and sawn timber to create an ugly but workable structure for the ground teams.

There were exactly two hundred and seven sailors at Lae and in the surrounding territory to man all the flak guns. These two hundred and seven men made up the
entire
air and ground defense of the base. Another one hundred and sixty-four men comprised the entire maintenance and ground support crews. There were seventy pilots and no more than a dozen other officers to handle weather, communications, medical and other needs. Lae was austerity at its ultimate.

The men lived twenty-three to a shack, laughably known as a billet. Its size covered six by ten yards and that was
all
. Cots stood in tight rows. One center table was enough for eating, working, writing letters, reading. Illumination came from candles.

Yet men do amazing things when there is need and their spirit is high. Empty fuel drums had been cut into impromptu bathtubs, and no pilot ever went more than one night without bathing. Other fuel drums had been cut and bent and shaped into washbasins and used for cooking and mess facilities.

Lae was a potential pesthole, needing only a very slight edge to drag its human inhabitants down with disease or rot or whatever. Every man washed his underclothes,
every
day. It must be so.

Naogaka glanced at the billets. They were only five hundred yards from the airstrip.

Dangerously close for a field subjected to so many enemy strikes. But the men had gouged their own dugouts from the ground, reinforced them with logs. Though crude, they were effective shelters.

Their living conditions were primitive, their food monotonous and unvarying, the airfield itself out of the stone age, and their morale unexcelled. Commander Gaishi Naogaka took singular pride in that morale. And their achievements. Among the thirty lead pilots of the Lae Wing, no less than fourteen men were aces, and several, he reminded himself, were aces several times over.

Yet they were disturbed. Their rules, to which they adhered with iron discipline, were being twisted and broken before their eyes. They still did not believe that Masahiko Obama had lost his life to bombers. Obama was too wise, too skilled, a man of too much experience to die at the hands of a bomber crew!

Yet it
had
happened. And more than a dozen other men went down in their Zeros.

Something had changed drastically. The B-25 was not so difficult an adversary. Yet these same airplanes with which they had had so little trouble were now smashing their way through fighter opposition. And what they did to shipping… Naogaka had flown over the debacle of landing barges and destroyed troopships and destroyers. He had refused to believe what he saw, that only twelve or thirteen B-25s could have wreaked such havoc. But it was true. The pilots swore it was so.

And then, the strike in Simpson Harbor. That was why he had been called to headquarters in Rabaul. First the devastated troop convoy, and then the powerful blow in the heart of the strongest naval base in that part of the world. Again by only a dozen of those strange B-25s! They had lost one of their force, it was true, but only one, and the pilot — in the best Japanese tradition, it must be noted — had taken his flaming airplane into the runway of Lakunai Airdrome and he had destroyed sixteen airplanes and killed more than eighty men as the American machine exploded in a long gout of flame and debris.

Gaishi Naogaka had taken a while to relax in the presence of Wing Commander Eisuke Terauchi. It is not an easy thing to do, to bring a critical note from higher headquarters to the same man who is your commanding officer. But Terauchi understood. For whatever headquarters had to say, however sharp the tone of its message, it was true.

The Lae Wing had been assigned to protect with aerial cover the troop movement of barges and shipping. It had failed to carry out its assignment. Thousands of soldiers and much equipment had been lost. The entire New Guinea campaign was jeopardized because of that loss. And all because of about a dozen American bombers. It had not taken the Japanese that long to understand the changes made in the B-25s. Somehow each plane had been given the firepower of an entire squadron. Getting in front of one of these new machines was fatal. Ships and flak positions and surviving pilots could attest to that.

So far the Americans had enjoyed the strength of innovation and surprise. No more. It was not to be so.

"Headquarters insists we must break the spirit and the back of this new group," Gaishi Naogaka said carefully to his commander. "We are to make a special effort to do so."

Terauchi waved a hand easily. "We will dispense with the special efforts," he smiled. He was free in the private company of his old friend. "We
will
deal with the Americans."

"Yes," Naogaka nodded. "We will institute the wolf-pack tactics. When we encounter these airplanes we will concentrate on one or two of them. Our men must cut those machines away from the herd and destroy them."

"Of course," agreed the Lae Wing commander. "But there is something else, Gaishi."

"Sir?"

"Why do we not have any reconnaissance photographs of this new group?"

Naogaka thought swiftly. Of course! "Sir, it had not occurred to me… but all the pictures, all of them, of the airfields near Moresby…" He nodded. "They have never been there."

"Yet there is no other airdrome from which they could operate, is there?" Eisuke Terauchi was speaking with a thin smile.